KUBRICK

The marathon was pretty damn awesome. Woke up with enough time to do a little getting ready before. I picked up some popcorn from Sweet Gnoshings (and even got to try a butterscotch beer in the process, good, I mean, it tasted just like liquid butterscotch, wouldn't want it frequently though). Then we picked Jacques up and were off to the drive-in! We got there about 6:45. There were some people already there but not many. A few cars had started to form a first row and a few started to form a second row. We nuzzled up into the first row. There weren't really that many cars to the side of us so we were just about front and center for the thing. Shortly thereafter a band started playing by the concession building. Typical Memphis throwback rock'n'roll; incongruous for a Kubrick festival, but you could tell they were friends with whoever set it up or whatever. Luckily we weren't very close to them and the echo across the vastness kinda sounded cool in parts. We had our folding chairs set up and the cooler out and it was pretty swell. The parking lot hasn't been kept up since drive-ins were a thing so the painted lines are faded mostly beyond recognition and parking spaces form in a haphazard organic growth. By the time the movies started, the place was really really full. I was pretty happy about that. Our one mistake was the radio. We did bring a portable radio, but it has a dial tuner and could not pick up the movie's frequency, so we had to rely on overhearing others' radios. Wasn't too bad for the most part. The Shining was pretty audible. A van behind us was playing it particularly loud. A Clockwork Orange was the hardest to hear. The loud van behind us had a family and I'm pretty sure they were gone for this. Then the car next to us kept turning its engine on making it harder to hear. But hearing wasn't totally necessary. Though of the movies we watched, Mary Beth and I had seen The Shining and 2001 within the past months so they were fresh, but it'd been a good while since I'd seen A Clockwork Orange or Dr. Strangelove. I knew Dr. Strangelove would require sound more than the others so I did put the keys in my car and turn the radio on and up with the windows down. That worked well, but I didn't do it for any of the other movies as I didn't wanna run my battery down (towards the end of the night we did see someone getting jumped off, hah). Oh, speaking of auto disasters: the pavement at the drive-in is grooved into these little hills. People kept driving across in front of us leaving or finding somewhere to park or whatever and may of 'em were going too fast for the bumps and kept bottoming out and scraping their cars. It was funniest when they kept doing it two or three times. "No, I won't take this as a sign to slow down, I'll just keep smashing the bottom of my vehicle, la de da." By the time of 2001, there were a lot fewer people (including that car next to us being gone) so there wasn't so much noise and we could overhear others' radios well enough (plus, I mean, this is the one that needs audio the least). Though people nearby started talking a lot. This real douchy guy seemed to have just shown up or something. Still, seeing it was an incredible experience. I was happy to have loved A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove just as much as ever. The weather was pretty nice. It felt a bit warm at times, but for the most part it was pretty cool. And we had our spray bottle fan for when it felt warm. The bugs were bitey but not TOO bad. I've got some bites, but I'm not covered. Felt 'em here and there but then would just spray ourselves. This time I think I got sold on the drive-in experience. It was kinda miserable when we saw Twilight and Inception a couple years ago, but we learned from it and were more prepared (also, I think the bugs were way worse that night which trapped us in the sweltering car). It was a lot of fun seeing those great films on the huge screen and being outside and all (even if the picture quality wasn't super great, you could tell they were just dvds projected off a laptop. You could see the pixelation on the screen. Still fun and I'm still glad to be able to say I've seen them on a big screen. 2001 was still breathtaking and trascendent and I was able to float above the dumb loud talking around me. So yeah, we watched some of Kubrick's best films from sunset to sunrise. Afterwards I saw a comment where the people who ran it called it "From Dusk to Dawn (of Man)" (I liked that). As 2001 was wrapping up, bits of light were starting to come into the sky. It was over a little before 6 am. As might be expected, the crowds and crowds of cars by this time were thinned out considerably, but there was still a pretty good number of people scattered about. Anyway, it was a really fun goddamned thing. Afterwards, we decided to do the inevitable and go get breakfast. Unfortunately, we had to find out the hard way that Sunday morning is the time that great super-early breakfast places aren't open quite as super-early. We tried Brother Junipers and found they wouldn't be open for two more hours and other places like Bryant's wouldn't be open for one more hour. We settled on IHOP anyway. Now I'm awake and did my tabatas and showered and all that jazz and it still feels like morning even though it's late afternoon!